Re. your last part here, what you say about Astarion is exactly what I find problematic. My choices seem to be either I embrace him or I kill him outright. What I would like is to be able to say something along the lines of: I find it utterly detestable that you're a vampire and that you feed on creatures - even non-humanoid ones. Your actions are uniformly evil. However, I'm going to tolerate you - for now - only because of the mutual situation we find ourselves in. But make no mistake. You give me the slightest of reasons to stake you, and I will. Or multiple such options between the two extremes.
I think it's fair to want this sort of dialogue, and something along these lines wouldbe warranted within the game, yes. But I have to admit that I am kinda taken aback by the extremity of your opinion on evil. I'm all for the idea of vampires being inherently evil because they're soulless and thus are metaphysically incapable of actually being good, but "even non-humanoid ones" is a fascinatingly intense opinion in my view. I mean, our PCs eat meat. I'd really like to hear you expand on that more. With Wyll, I also disagree with your stance there but it's a stance I see as entirely reasonable. And again something that should be supported within the scope of the game.
I'd add this to what I say at the end of my last post above. In keeping with this thread's purpose, if there was any way for Larian to *surprise* me with BG3, and this would be an awesome and beautiful surprise, it is if we learn later in the game that we are, somehow, the actual last remaining Bhaalspawn. And, the perfect way to do this would be to make this so ONLY for a custom PC, and NOT for any of the Larian origin PCs. So if you play as an origin PC, the angle connecting BG3 to the original games is something else. But if you play as a custom PC, then what makes your custom PC special is that they are the last Bhaalspawn.
Bonus points to Larian if our custom PC is the offspring of Abdel and Jaheira.
Would obviously require some very creative writing for a non-human/half-elf PC.
Honestly, I feel like having our custom PC be the true "Last Bhaalspawn" might be treading too close to rehashing the original games, rather than just connecting them. But revealing our character to be the chid of Jaheira and Abdel would definitely be too much in my opinion. Especially since I am on principle against them making a canon Gorion's Ward in lore. I generally feel like a bad sequel won't normally actually ruin the past games, but I find that the exception is when the sequel tries to connect itself too much to the prior installments and lean on them rather than moving forward. It can result in taking things that worked in the original and introducing implications that make the original worse in retrospect.
